Social scientists left and right have long engaged in the project of identifying the conditions under which revolutionary, class-conscious social movements emerge. This project aims at prediction, in the hope of either promoting social revolutions or preventing them. Until quite recently both Marxist and liberal social scientists have focussed on “modern” urban social classes as the generators of revolution: the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals, the industrial proletarlat. But paradoxically, though Marx summarily dismissed the peasantry as so many “potatoes in a sack,” and despite the generality of working-class social movements, the major revolutions of our time have been made largely by country people, to the extent that they were made by social movements at all. Thus two major issues take shape in the study of revolutions. One, how and why do peasants—allegedly “premodern” and conservative—defy the laws of social science and becomerevolutionary agents? What is it about rural social conditions that enabled them to dynamite the old order? Two, what is the relationship between revolutionary social movements on the one hand, and revolutionary outcomes on the other? A movement entails the collective action of a class whose ideology may be described as more or less radical; a revolution entails the overhauling of a social structure. In this context, no matter how ideologically “revolutionary” a social movement may be, it is but one of the causal elements that converge to produce social revolution.

The quest for information about a historical figure in this study is part of a larger research into the interethnic relationships among the different groups of Arabs in Galilee: peasants and nomads, Muslims, Christians, and Druzes.1 This paper on a strongman who dominated the Galilee for nearly thirty years is written out of a conviction that in his life-history we can see the dynamics of group relations in his time and that his biography is comparable to those of similar figures in other parts of the world.

Nature is seen by humans through a screen of beliefs, knowledge, and purposes, and it is in terms of their images of nature, rather than of the actual structure of nature, that they act. Yet, it is upon nature itself that they do act, and it is nature itself that acts upon them, nurturing or destroying them.

Rappaport (1979:97)

To begin a revolution is very difficult. To sustain it is even more difficult. To win it is almost impossible. But once you have won, then your troubles really begin.

Stephen Bann states that Utopia “forms the concrete expression of a moment of possibility, which is however annihilated in the very process of being enunciated” (Bann 1993:1, emphasis added). He traces this characteristic to Sir Thomas More, whose neologism Utopia puns on being both the Good Place (eutopia) and No Place (Outopia), and to the modern denial of this No Place, which he labels ”a ritual of double negation” (Bann 1993:1). The present essay focuses on one ethnographic instance of Utopia's annihilation by enunciation. I will demonstrate that, when the enunciation of Utopia requires the implementation of public policy, the process of creating the Good Place is undermined by the mundane demands of practical politics.

On 14 September 1908, at the Sixteenth International Congress of Americanists in Vienna, Alberto Vojtěch FričAlberto Vojtěch Frič used several variations of his name in his publications and correspondence, including Alberto Frič, Albert Frič, Adalbert Frič, and Vojtěch Frič. who had been sent to Brazil in 1906 to collect ethnographica for German museums, threw the otherwise orderly scientific proceedings into turmoil. During his presentation on the Bugres Indians of South America, Frič denounced the brutal treatment of the Kaingáng and Xokléng tribes at the hands of German colonists in the states of Santa Catarina and Paraná in southern Brazil. He complained to the Americanists that slavery, wide-spread murder, and bands of “human-hunters” could not only be found in the “independent states of the Congo”: “such acts and much worse” were being financed by German colonists living in the “civilized states of Brazil.” Frič revealed that German settlers were hiring paid killers to eradicate entire tribes of Indians and permitting the sale and clandestine enslavement of their children. He also protested that the Brazilian government was turning a blind eye to these atrocities, and he demanded that the congress act jointly to put an end to the violence.A. Frič, “Völkerwanderung, Ethnographie und Geschichte der Konquista in Südbrasilien,” in Verhandlungen des XVI Internationalen Amerikanisten-Kongresses (Wien, 1909), 63–67.

The role of trust in long-distance trade has been a topic of inquiry and debate among economists, sociologists, and historians. Much of this literature hinges on the social, legal, and economic structures that undergird, if not obviate, the concept of trust. This article draws on assemblage theory to suggest that trust in Indian Ocean trade is better understood as a key component of a commercial assemblage. Laws or social mores are not external to but rather enrolled within an assemblage constituted by people, commodities, profits, and “feelings,” as well as judicial systems. This conceptualization of trust is demonstrated through a close analysis of one trading relationship between a Somali merchant and an Indian merchant based in Aden and trading in the Idrisi Emirate of Asir. They established a partnership to exploit elevated prices in Asir during the First World War. After several months of trading, accusations of fraud and embezzling unraveled the partnership and entangled both men in years of legal battles. By tracing the changing socio-material assemblage of this partnership, the article demonstrates how trust should be understood as a dynamic and contingent factor in the operation of commercial agency.

Our view of agricultural slavery tends to be dominated by the plantation model familiar from modern slavery, especially in the Caribbean and the Cotton Kingdom of the southern United States. The well-documented plantation model is in fact a useful comparative tool which, when properly used, can advance our understanding of the less well-documented Roman latifundist slavery. This plantation model is all but irrelevant, however, to the very different slave regime of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries b.c., and one must look elsewhere for a similarly well-documented model to use for the purpose of comparative analysis of Athenian agricultural slavery. Such a model, I would suggest, can be found in the agricultural slave regime of the northern North American colonies (New England and, to a lesser degree, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) in the second half of the eighteenth century. As we shall see, this less familiar regime of slavery in these colonies displays striking similarities to the agricultural slave regime of classical Athens. We will examine some of these similarities and indicate, by illustration, some of the ways by which a knowledge of northern agricultural slavery can be of use to the student of Athenian social history.

As we enter the twenty-first century, the photographed, digitally produced, and globally disseminated printed image impinges upon us with growing insistence from all directions, inflecting and normalizing certain views and desires while foreclosing and obscuring others. Never before has it been so cheap or easy to purchase, use, and then toss away a camera, so commonsensical to expect the everyday images that crowd one's day to “cover the globe,” or so unsettling to see the specter of total visibility and surveillance granted such legitimacy. Yet in an age in which the Internet is celebrated by many with messianic fervor, when modernity's fascination with speed enjoys a new apotheosis, and when the perceived shrinking of the globe crystallizes in the quaint vision of a “village” ready-made for a millennial “Family of Mankind” album, the photograph in all its two-dimensional stillness seems to beckon from a more quiet and disappearing world. Increasingly in this great blizzard of speed, technology, and global communication, all photographs appear to emit a sepia-toned glow. This may be one reason why the study of photographs and photography has become especially attractive in the last decade among those scholars especially attuned to their social and historical dimensions, notably anthropologists, historians, literary and art critics.

What do Christians do when they read? How can Christian reading be understood anthropologically? Anthropologists of Christianity have offered many ethnographic descriptions of the interplay among people, words, and material objects across Christian groups, but descriptions of Christian reading have often posited an androgynous reader. In response to this we begin from the observation that while reading cannot be done without words, it also cannot be done without a body. We propose that an analytic approach of placing language and materiality (including bodies) together will help clarify that reading texts is an embodied practice, while not undermining the importance of working with words. We draw inspiration from the recent interest in bringing linguistic anthropology and materiality studies together into the same analytic frame of “language materiality.” We explore a language-materiality approach to reading by comparing how the biblical story of Mary and Martha was read by Protestant women in two historical situations: 1920s Norway and the 1950s United States. We argue that in these cases the readers’ gendered, raced, and classed bodies were central to the activity of reading texts, including their bodies’ material engagements with the world, such as carrying out women's work. We suggest that paying attention to embodied reading—that is, readers’ social entanglements with both language and materiality—yields a fuller analysis of what reading is in particular historical situations, and ultimately questions the notion of a singular Protestant semiotic ideology that works consistently toward purification.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the history of the Palestine mandate and its power relations were not determined solely by a series of legal measures, beginning with the 1917 Balfour Declaration and ending with the UNGA partition resolution of 1947. Rather, the emergence of modern Palestine was a process significantly guided by global technocapitalism. Palestine was constituted on the basis of a successful Zionist pitch for the area as an economically viable territory—as an area of production and consumption and crucially also as an entity locatable in the global circulation of capital and commodities. A central vehicle for this technocapitalist vision in Palestine—proposed by the Zionists, and enthusiastically adopted by the British—was a hydroelectrical megasystem in the Jordan Valley. Significant portions of the mandate's borders were mapped onto the station's technical blueprint, and conceiving of and building the powerhouse created not just borders, but also “Palestine,” a bounded entity with a distinct political and economic character. While the electrification, like Zionism in general, was justified in a language of egalitarian universalism, the power system and the “free-market” capitalist system it helped create in Palestine generated familiar kinds of political and economic inequality. Specifically, it conjured a political-economic order based on a Jewish national scale in which the Arabs were expected to supply the menial labor power in return for the economic development that was to lift all boats.

There are at least five ways of treating a political theory. One is to consider it a form of intellectual exercise, pure and simple—an adventure in abstraction to sharpen the mind. Another is to go through it, and through other theories, seeking a personal practical philosophy for oneself. A third is to distil the history out of a political theory—examine what light the theory can throw on the age from which it emerged. A fourth is also to treat the theory as a source of historical data, but not in the sense in which a river may conceivably be a source of some dissolved substance from the silt it carries, but in the sense in which a river may be a source of water. In this latter sense a political theory is not distilled to yield history. It is itself part of the flow of history—part of what Americans sometimes call intellectual history.

This is a study of landlordism, agricultural labourers, and the State of Andalusia in southern Spain. This region, a classical case of landlordism, deviates from the typically West European agrarian structure dominated by the family farm. Andalusia's history centers on the conflict over land between a majority of landless peasants and a minority of powerful landlords, which was one of the main causes of the Spanish civil war. This study deals with two periods covering nearly fifty years of this latifundist system and its conflictridden relations of production. It examines the freezing of the agrarian structure for nearly forty years by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and the adaptation of social and agrarian policy for the next ten years by the socialists. In other words, this is the story of how the agricultural laborers of Andalusia were transformed in less than one-half century from “peasants without land” to “clients of the welfare state” dependent on the social policies of the state.

During the 1930's, especially in the early depression years, welfare associations of African intellectuals, for the most part Government clerks or mission employees, were formed in Northern Rhodesia. Originally conceived as guilds of conscious elites, what many Europeans of the period distastefully referred to as ”detribalized natives“, these associations quickly became, or were considered to have become, organs of wider significance. Many persons who later rose to prominence in politics and the trade union movement acquired their first organizational experience in these short-lived, rather underestimated protest bodies. As the name suggests, there were many resemblances to nineteenth-century British workmens' associations; certainly in the line of rail towns stretching from the Falls to Ndola, the Duke of Wellington's convictions were resurrected by Government a century later in another land. When Government directed its basilisk gaze at these associations in 1933, they quickly succumbed. Still, one is justified in studying them, if only because they serve to increase the number of Africans in African history.

This essay compares the two greatest conquest movements of pre-modern times, the Arab and the Mongol, which resulted in the creation of world empires, and analyzes the importance of religion in these events. This attempt is hardly in the mainstream of current cultural anthropology, which does not encourage much comparative study of historical societies separated in time and space. Nonetheless, perhaps this comparison will facilitate a better understanding of some serious conceptual problems that both of these conquests pose for anthropologists and historians. The fact that the Arab society had a strong nomadic component and the Mongol society was firmly based on pastoral nomadism makes this comparison even more interesting.

In a recent paper in this journal, Bernard Wong (1978) compares the assimilative experiences of Chinese in New York City and Lima, Peru. He concludes that the Lima Chinese are substantially more assimilated than their New York counterparts and attributes this distinction in part to differences in the attitudes of the larger societies in which the two Chinese communities are embedded. Discriminatory immigration and miscegenation laws and endemic racism in the United States inhibited the assimilation of the New York Chinese, while a substantially lower level of racial prejudice and official discrimination in Peru facilitated the assimilative process there.

Durable Inequality is an important and insightful book. In this work, Charles Tilly links organizational needs to the production and reproduction of social inequality. For some time now, organizational theorists have demonstrated that formal organizations are central actors in modern society, and that the significant environment of formal organizations are other formal organizations. Durable Inequality demonstrates how social inequality is directly tied to solving organizational problems. His four master mechanisms—exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and adaptation—tell us a great deal about how inequality is produced and maintained. The argument about categorical pairing and how such pairing is used by organizations to generate inequality is plausible and seductive.

Scholars of Russian-American relations in the late nineteenth century have long been concerned with the personalities and writings of university-based experts, journalists, diplomats, and political activists. We are well acquainted with the observations of various American commentators on the backward state of Russian state, society, economy, and politics. While the activities of prominent men such as George Kennan have effortlessly dominated the historical agenda, the negative discourses that they produced about Russia have subsumed other important American representations of the country. Since the period of early modern history, European travelers had seen Russia as a barbarous land of slave-like people, responsive only to the persuasions of the whip and the knout wielded by an autocratic tsar. Subsequently, Larry Wolff has shown that Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers created images of a despotic and backward Eastern Europe in order to validate the idea of a progressive, enlightened, and civilized Western Europe.

It is no accident that the study of comparative politics, and especially thestudy of political development, has been dominated by scholars from themetropolitan countries, or by those trained in metropolitan universities.This interest in the politics of the subordinate world has resulted in aseries of case studies, which we have assumed have added substantially toour knowledge about these hitherto neglected areas. However, untilfairly recently, little attention has been paid to the underlying assumptionsand ideologies of these metropolitan scholars, and the distortions, consciousand unconscious, introduced into scholarship on these areas underthe guise of scientific and value-free methodologies.